Interlochen--A Different Focus

One of the things that I love most about being at Interlochen is that our focus as a family can change for a few weeks. At home, we are so busy between all the kid activities, John's job, callings, our property, the dogs--it never seems to stop. At Interlochen, however, we don't have a bunch of those things around, don't need to worry about them and consequently find other things to do, and occasionally, find nothing to do at all (which is just fine too).

At home, we hate pests. On our property specifically, mice, groundhogs and deer. I'm thankful for our cats which take out the general mice population (although I still see more mice than I would like on our doormats). Roxy scared away the groundhogs years ago which saves all kinds of things. We still get rabbits, but again, the cats do their best with them, and we put up a fence so all the strawberries were OURS this year. The deer leave deer ticks all over the yard, but with the dogs, we don't see much of them anymore. Needless to say, when I see any of these animals on our property, I sneer and drive off the driveway (and after them) to scare them away.

Here at Interlochen, things are a bit different. There are squirrels and chipmunks everywhere, but I have no loathing feelings towards them. In fact, they're kind of cute. Credit the fact that I'm probably missing my own pets to this new-found affection, but either way, I'm actually taking pictures of them.

Last night, some lazy camper left their food tray outside the cafeteria. I've never seen this done, and if I could, I would have a talk with that camper. However, once a squirrel jumped up on it, I was kind of glad. This squirrel was the littlest thing. It reminded all of us of the squirrel that jumped out of a trash can at Glo last year. :-)



Then, this morning, I was coming out of the shower, and I saw some furry creature run out of the room. I figured it was a mouse since there are mousetraps in our apartment and looked for how it was getting into the apartment under the stove. I wasn't too happy about this, because I still feel no love for mice. When I moved closer, "it" ran out of the kitchen and through a small hole in our screen door and outside. I quickly ran after it and spotted a very cute chipmunk. I sat on the couch for a few minutes, staring at the hole and wondering if my Cheeze Nips could be used to lure it back in :-)



Glo stays really busy during the day. She has rehearsal from 8:30-10:45 and then ceramics from 11:00-12:00 in the morning. In the afternoon, she heads off to her environmental studies class and then back for another hour of sectionals. Because of this, she definitely enjoys her downtime. Couple that with the fact that John barely works 6 hours in two days, and the two of them have had a lot of time to spend together. Can you guess what they are doing here?



Finally, the concerts for the year haven't really kicked in yet. Everybody just got here, and rehearsals have been going full force, but no actual performances for another two days. This has left our evenings wide open. Last night, we headed to the water front. Ahhhh....